Ken Burns talks about stories

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A short documentary about documentary-maker Ken Burns (after whom the “Ken Burns effect” in iMovie is named), with his thoughts on what makes a good story. Interestingly, this quote (from Kottke.org) keys into our work on liberal humanism.

Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he’s got enough time to go to the theatre. That’s a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That’s a good story.